This blog discusses items of interest to genealogical researchers, with an emphasis on California. It also focuses on internet-centered genealogy research, and covers tools and techniques unique to that space.

09 June 2010

Google's Caffeine

As a searcher, Caffeine will supposedly work behind the scenes to bring you faster and more relevant results, in a more comprehensive way. Google visualizes it thusly:

Which essentially means that when you go to Home Depot to look at paint cards, you will be, instead, minisculized to the size of an atom and sucked into a vortex full of home electronics and user manuals.

In seriousness, though, the illustration is meant to suggest that the new indexing system is a much more dynamic and holistic approach to web indexing than their former, more hierarchical one. It should provide faster listing of new pages in the index, and changes to existing pages should show up faster as well.

Web content owners don't have to worry about making any changes to pages they have created, and searchers don't need to modify their search approaches. It does mean that pages in the Google Cache will see more frequent turnover, as blog resourceshelf points out, so searchers who would like to archive a current version of a page should begin to consider alternative ways to take "snapshots" of a page, since the more frequent updating will mean that Google Cache is no longer a viable option, as the index will most likely always be reflecting the current state of the page.